I got the strangest email from Ted Steele, one of those panspermia kooks, addressed to Paul Davies, complaining about priority. Why he wrote to me, I don’t know — I’m not a fan of either of them. It’s just so odd what set these guys off.

Here it is.

Dear Paul :

Scientific Behaviour of Paul Davies

I am writing to you directly and to ASU President Professor Michael Crow, and copied to many other scientific colleagues who know exactly what I am talking about [I guess that’s me?]

We are living through our Covid-era where outright lies and misinformation is being pushed on us on a grand scale- by the main stream media in lock step with BigPharma, Big Government and, and in many distressing situations, as we have here, by senior scientists who operate at the sophisticated extreme end of dishonesty, knavery and thievery.

There is a news article in The Guardian newspaper, and, as I now understand it , also promulgated in some low grade science weeklies, which paints Arizona State University’s Professor Paul Davies as the essential founder of the new scientific disciple of Astrobiology.

Viruses may exist ‘elsewhere in the universe’, warns scientist (msn.com)

The article quotes Davies on the possibility of extraterrestrial viruses, which he thinks is possible (sure, why not), but that we shouldn’t worry about them, and he says only a few batty things like this:

A friend of mine thinks most, but certainly a significant fraction, of the human genome is actually of viral origin, said Davies, whose new book, What’s Eating the Universe?, is published this week.

I think the offense to Steele, though, is that the article calls Davies “an astrobiologist”. Not the essential founder of the new scientific disciple of Astrobiology, just “an astrobiologist”. This is unforgivable.

This is scientific misconduct pure and simple – somewhat more sophisticated than many, but misconduct nevertheless. The published scientific record in science is inviolate, it cannot be messed with.

The strong objective scientific concept that the universe is teeming with life and the marshalling of the key evidence, experimental data and observations- and their appropriate critical analysis and interpretation, can be fairly traced and attributed directly to Professor Sir Fred Hoyle and Professor N Chandra Wickramasinghe. These two great scientists are in the that special home that human history knows as the “ Pantheon”.

The Pantheon? Really? I’ve been calling Wickramasinghe the boss of the Panspermia Mafia, but maybe I have to upgrade “mafia” to “cult”.

You allude to Fred Hoyle in your article, but I could not figure out why then there was no proper attribution of scientific priority, particularly because at your Wikipedia site you make the following strong claim in your CV

“In 1970, he completed his PhD under the supervision of Michael J. Seaton and Sigurd Zienau at University College London.[1][2] He then carried out postdoctoral research under Fred Hoyle at the University of Cambridge. “

This claim is then repeated in the Wiki side box.

Why then not cite all the prior body of work by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe and colleagues if you were one of Fred’s post docs?

This is a strange argument. That is what Wikipedia says, but Wikipedia is not Paul Davies CV. If you look at Davies’ actual CV, he doesn’t mention being a post-doc with Hoyle. That’s a curious insertion by who ever did create that Wikipedia entry.

But also, even if he had been Hoyle’s post-doc, that association does not imply that one has to “cite all the prior body of work” in a short article in the Guardian.

But you see that statement in your CV is a lie i.e. untrue, it is bogus. It may well be a real fantasy in Paul Davies’ mind, but it is a lie nevertheless. Fred would be turning in his grave. As I understand it he told you to go away.

Oooh. Oooh. Do tell. Spill that tea.

If Hoyle told Davies to go away, that would somewhat enhance Davies’ reputation to my mind. Ted Steele, though, must be in his dotage to take such offense at a wiki article that Davies did not write and to be so outraged that a journalist clumped Davies in the same category as Hoyle and Wickramasinghe. He’s just beginning to get worked up.

There are two fundamental conditions that distinguish true scientists from the run of the mill ordinary behaviour, which all real scientists learn as they develop and continue in their search for the truth:

• When the facts change, you change your mind.

• Report and tell the Truth – do not lie and cheat.

These two guiding principles of course are also being torn up on a grand scale right now. But they still need to be restated, and when transgressed, firmly called out :

Paul Davies… you are simply a grub criminal trying to make a fast buck.

The whole matter is really quite disgusting – but has to be exposed for what it is.

Then he goes on to include a link to all of Chandra Wickramasinghe’s articles, because apparently that is what one must do nowadays.

It’s amazing what petty bullshit will trigger the Panspermia Cult. ‘Oh no, you didn’t praise Hoyle and Wickramasinghe enough!’ I also wouldn’t be surprised if Steele and Wickramasinghe and gang are prepared to claim that SARS-CoV-2 fell from outer space. Oh, wait, he already has.

I’m hoping for a Kilkenny-cats-style outcome.

I’m so sorry. I stumbled into a den of rabid naturopaths who were just oozing this malarkey to justify their beliefs, and now I’m exposing you to it. It’s just a quick exposure, you’ll develop resistance quickly enough.

First I have to point out that calling something a theory doesn’t make it true. A valid theory has to be supported by a wide base of observation and experimental evidence — you don’t get to label something as a theory because you think it would dignify your brain fart. I will point out that Haeckel’s recapitulation theory was a theory, too, which was built on nothing but speculation and misinterpretation, and it collapsed thoroughly.

Secondly, theories are not sanctified by attaching a 19th century scientist’s name to it, allowing you to ignore all work ever since. Haeckel was, I think, a pretty good guy, but that doesn’t make his ideas valid. Likewise (and this is a common creationist mistake), Darwin wasn’t the be-all and end-all of evolutionary thinking, and glorifying or trashing Charles Darwin has no effect on whether evolution is true or not.

I mention these two things because they are the totality of the evidence for Terrain Theory: it is called a theory, therefore it is a theory, and it was formulated by a 19th century scientist named Antoine Béchamp, a rival of Louis Pasteur, and Pasteur was a fraud who recanted Germ Theory on his deathbed, therefore Béchamp wins. That’s kind of it. It’s an archaic hypothesis that did not survive the testing grounds of science a hundred years ago, but now it’s been resurrected by anti-vax loons who are waving the banner of Béchamp and Terrain Theory, never mind the evidence.

So what is it? Here’s one definition from a Dr Karen (note: linking to her site is not an endorsement. She’s a kook who sells nutritional supplements and cleanses and superfoods, all the latest grifter buzzwords).

Terrain theory states that diseases are results of our internal environment and its ability to maintain homeostasis against outside threats. Terrain theory believes if an individual maintains a healthy terrain, it can handle outside invaders or threats which cause diseases. When terrain is weak, it favors the microorganisms. Hence, the health depends on the quality of an individuals’ terrain.

She’s understating it. Most scientists and doctors wouldn’t find the overall idea objectionable: your ability to resist disease is going to be affected by your general health, that poor nutrition will impair your ability to fight off bacteria and viruses, and hey you, get out and exercise more and eat a healthy diet. That aspect is fine. Where Terrain Theory goes off the rails is when it becomes a complete denial of the role of microorganisms in disease. Polio, for instance, isn’t caused by a virus, the virus is just a symptom of the lousy condition your body is in. Cancer isn’t caused by mutations in cells that lead to overproliferation, it’s a product of your pH. You’ve probably seen garbage like this — cancer cures that are all about eating the right foods to adjust your body chemistry, or purging yourself of toxins with magical cleanses.

Here’s another quack, “Dr” Young (again, linking is not an endorsement, Young is an evil creep. See Gorski’s take-down as a “cleanse”).

Béchamp was able to see bacteria, and other nano materials emerge from the cell, as opposed to coming
from outside the cell, like most people have been taught.

Dr. Young doesn’t believe that corona, ebola, or zika can infect a human being, let alone exist at all.
“For you are dust, and to dust you shall return” Genesis 3:19

Béchamp proposed that the environment of the body, determines what can live and not live. Young says that the source of common disease, is chemical poisoning, which can come in many forms, such as pesticides, herbicides, genetically modified foods, and vaccines. All of which, do not come from nature. They are produced by the military – industrial – pharmaceutical complex.

There’s a lot of familiar tropes in Young’s “work”. There’s the referring to himself in the third person, the false authority of a title (he has a doctorate from a diploma mill), the irrelevant Biblical reference, the pretense of idolizing a long-dead scientist, the denial of all contemporary evidence, and the choice of convenient scapegoats, the military–industrial–pharmaceutical complex and Louis Pasteur. He also cites this weird claim that Pasteur recanted germ theory on his deathbed. What is it with these people? They also claim Darwin recanted evolution on his deathbed (he didn’t), as if any of that would matter. Both Pasteur and Darwin died quietly in their old age after long illnesses; they had more important things on their mind, and weren’t busily marshaling arguments for an academic debate. They were busy dying. The people who cite Béchamp are quacks.

I expect we’ll hear more about Terrain Theory now and in the future. The anti-vax brigade will rush to endorse anything that sounds sciencey, while doing their damnedest to ignore 150 years of good, solid, evidence-based science that shows that germ theory is still valid.

Sheesh. If you’d told me 40 years ago that in the far future, in the 2020s, I’d have to defend the germ theory of disease, of all things, I’d have to ask what cataclysmic disaster had destroyed civilization and reduced us to a post-apocalyptic wilderness. But no! All it took was Fox News and the Republican party to shatter the public understanding of science.

By the way, at least Robert Young was convicted of multiple counts of grand theft and conspiring to practice medicine without a license a few years ago. So I guess some vestiges of justice still linger in our desolation.

Also, not this Robert Young.

If you’ve paid any attention to anti-vaxxers, or are on the mailing list of some annoying conservative, you may have heard this one: there is a peer-reviewed study in an established science journal that shows that vaccines kill almost as many people as the pandemic. Oh no, you might say, maybe I shouldn’t get vaccinated if doing so has a significant risk of death!

Unfortunately, as I’ve said before, sometimes complete bollocks slithers through the peer-review process, and this is no exception. It’s such utter garbage that the board of the guilty journal is experiencing a wave of resignations in protest

Several reputed virologists and vaccinologists have resigned as editors of the journal Vaccines to protest its 24 June publication of a peer-reviewed article that misuses data to conclude that “for three deaths prevented by [COVID-19] vaccination, we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination.”

Since Friday, at least six scientists have resigned positions as associate or section editors with Vaccines, including Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Katie Ewer, an immunologist at the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford who was on the team that developed the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Their resignations were first reported by Retraction Watch.

It’s a case study in how to destroy a journal’s reputation with a single stupid paper.

The paper is a case of “garbage in, garbage out,” says Helen Petousis-Harris, a vaccinologist who directs the Vaccine Datalink and Research Group at the University of Auckland and who also resigned as a Vaccines editor after reading the paper. Diane Harper, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who was founding editor-in-chief of Vaccines, also resigned, as did Paul Licciardi, an immunologist at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Parkville, Australia, and Andrew Pekosz, a respiratory virologist at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The resignations began Friday, the day after the paper was published. By early Monday, Fanny Fang, the journal’s managing editor, wrote to the editorial board members that Vaccines—a reputable open-access journal launched in 2013 by Basel, Switzerland–based publisher MDPI—had opened an investigation into the paper. “We are treating this case with the utmost seriousness and are committed to swiftly correcting the scientific record,” she wrote.

The first obvious problem is that none of the paper’s authors have any expertise in the field. Further, the reviewers who let it through are similarly bereft of experience. Despite the fact that the journal is titled Vaccine, apparently some of the editors are also lacking in relevant knowledge.

None of the paper’s authors is trained in vaccinology, virology, or epidemiology. They are: Harald Walach, a clinical psychologist and science historian by training who describes himself as a health researcher at Poznan University of Medical Sciences in Poland; Rainer Klement, a physicist who studies ketogenic diets in cancer treatment at the Leopoldina Hospital in Schweinfurt, Germany; and Wouter Aukema, an independent data scientist in Hoenderloo, Netherlands.

The three peer reviewers on the paper, two of them anonymous, did not offer any substantial criticism of the authors’ methodology in these brief reviews. One of them, Anne Ulrich, a chemist who directs the Institute of Biological Interfaces and is chair of biochemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, wrote that the authors’ analysis “is performed responsibly … and without methodological flaws … and the results were interpreted with the necessary caveats.”

To make it worse, the authors relied on data from a Dutch study…and the authors of that study are saying that their work was misused and inappropriately interpreted.

On 25 June, the day after the paper’s publication, Lareb’s head of science and research, Eugène van Puijenbroek, sent an email to Vaccines’s editors, criticizing the paper and requesting a correction or retraction.

“A reported event that occurred after vaccination is … not necessarily being caused by the vaccination, although our data was presented as being causally related by the authors,” van Puijenbroek wrote. “Suggesting all reports with a fatal outcome to be causally related is far from truth.”

He also took the authors to task for stating in the paper that “the Dutch [registry] data, especially the fatal cases, were certified by medical specialists.”

“This point is simply incorrect,” van Puijenbroek wrote. “The authors seem to refer to [Lareb’s] policy plan. However, in this plan (in Dutch), it is nowhere mentioned that the reports are ‘certified’ by medical specialists.”

Woopsie. The paper has since been retracted, and the journal is doing an in-house investigation of how this screwup occurred, but it looks to me like a whole lot of the people competent to carry out such an investigation have up and quit altogether. And the damage has been done. The anti-vaxxers will continue to cite the paper — they still think Andrew Wakefield’s work was credible — and they’ll scream “Cover up!” at the retraction.

Oh, this is so silly. It’s a paper titled A Statistical Estimation of the Occurrence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the Milky Way Galaxy. All it is is an exercise in modeling the hypothetical distribution of hypothetical intelligent life in the galaxy, taking into account the age distribution of stars.

In the field of Astrobiology, the precise location, prevalence and age of potential
extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) have not been explicitly explored. Here, we address these
inquiries using an empirical galactic simulation model to analyze the spatial-temporal variations
and the prevalence of potential ETI within the Galaxy. This model estimates the occurrence of ETI,
providing guidance on where to look for intelligent life in the Search for ETI (SETI) with a set of
criteria, including well-established astrophysical properties of the Milky Way. Further, typically
overlooked factors such as the process of abiogenesis, different evolutionary timescales and
potential self-annihilation are incorporated to explore the growth propensity of ETI. We examine
three major parameters: 1) the likelihood rate of abiogenesis (λA); 2) evolutionary timescales (Tevo);
and 3) probability of self-annihilation of complex life (Pann). We found Pann to be the most
influential parameter determining the quantity and age of galactic intelligent life. Our model
simulation also identified a peak location for ETI at an annular region approximately 4 kpc from
the Galactic center around 8 billion years (Gyrs), with complex life decreasing temporally and
spatially from the peak point, asserting a high likelihood of intelligent life in the galactic inner
disk. The simulated age distributions also suggest that most of the intelligent life in our galaxy are
young, thus making observation or detection difficult.

<sigh>. Why? I sympathize with the idea of having fun with math, but the Drake equation is simple-minded algebra, not particularly interesting, and isn’t going to produce testable results.The authors seem to have confused their model with reality. This makes no sense:

We also concluded that at the current time of the study, most intelligent life in the Galaxy is
younger than 0.5 Gyr, with values of probability parameter for self-annihilation between 0 – 0.01;
with a relatively higher value of the annihilation parameter (≥ 0.1), most intelligent life is younger
than 0.01 Gyr. As we cannot assume a low probability of annihilation, it is possible that intelligent
life elsewhere in the Galaxy is still too young to be observed by us. Therefore, our findings can
imply that intelligent life may be common in the Galaxy but is still young, supporting the optimistic
aspect for the practice of SETI. Our results also suggest that our location on Earth is not within the
region where most intelligent life is settled, and SETI practices need to be closer to the inner
Galaxy, preferably at the annulus 4 kpc from the Galactic Center.

But…but…they’re talking about the parameters of their simulation! Their “probability parameter for self-annihilation” is something they set. All of the numbers they plug in are guesstimates, with varying degrees of reasonable justification. Of course they make an optimistic conclusion about SETI! But why should anyone accept their conclusions about an appropriate region for searching for intelligent life? Fudge their parameters a little more and you could shift the zone of likelihood where ever you want. They’ve added nothing to our understanding of the universe, unless you think that multiplying a bunch of numbers by a different bunch of numbers giving you a new result is earthshaking.

I really have to ask…why don’t reviewers simply stamp papers that are all about manipulating the Drake equation with a big red REJECT label? It would save them time and reduce the clutter in the scientific literature. Is there any value in YAWOD (Yet Another Wank Over Drake)? Who finds these informative?

I’m rather astonished that Salon chose to publish this article, Why some scientists believe life may have started on Mars. The operative words in that title are some – we’re talking about a tiny fringe minority – and believe, because they sure don’t have any evidence for their ideas. I guess Salon is desperate for news, so they’re letting writers invent some.

They don’t provide any evidence for their claim, only a weak chain of rationalizations.

• Some Mars rocks have been found on Earth. True enough. Meteor collisions with Mars can splash rocks into space, and they occasionally fall to Earth.
• Maybe early Martian life was adapted to survive meteor impacts, and was so hardy it could have survived the accidental launch and long journey? I had to laugh. Nothing evolves to survive meteor impacts.
• Maybe early life was fine with harsh environments? Early life would have been adapted to aqueous environments; “harsh” is floating away from food sources and warmth and a predictable pH, not drying out completely and surviving a vacuum.
• Life on Earth evolved “quickly”, too quickly. Yeah, we think replicators evolved shortly after the planet cooled enough to have liquid water. We’re talking within…200 million years. That’s not enough time? How do you know?
• Mars cooled before Earth, therefore life could have evolved there first. Wait, you think 200 million years is inadequate for life to evolve on Earth, but there was time enough for it to evolve on Mars?

The real reason this fact-free idea is getting promoted is because a couple of crackpots from Harvard, Gary Ruvkun and Avi Loeb (remember him? The Oumuamua guy?) said it, and “Harvard” is a magical incantation to the rubes. They don’t have a speck of evidence, though. It all sounds like something someone would have babbled about over lunch, and then the speculation went critical, and because they’re Harvard guys, they think it’s worth announcing to the news agencies. That’s it. That’s all this is.

They’re not even particularly clever Harvard guys.

“To me the idea that it all started on Earth, and every single solar system has their own little evolution of life happening, and they’re all independent — it just seems kind of dumb,” Ruvkun said. “It’s so much more explanatory to say ‘no, it’s spreading, it’s spreading all across the universe, and we caught it too, it didn’t start here,” he added. “And in this moment during the pandemic — what a great moment to pitch the idea. Maybe people will finally believe it.”

“Seems kind of dumb” is not an argument. It seems kind of dumb to me to suggest that the first life on earth, which would have been fragile and relatively simple, happened to be so robust and stable that it could have survived a massive shock that threw it into space, where it drifted for hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, in a vacuum, bathing in radiation, to survive a super-heated re-entry to an alien atmosphere, crashing to Earth to resume where it left off on a Martian ocean. And that this was a more significant contribution to early life than countless chemical reactions churning out organic molecules at the bottom of Earth’s oceans.

These people are fine with reciting silly arguments about the great improbability of chemicals coming together to form a self-perpetuating metabolism, but hey, chance survivors on rare random rocks flung into an immensely empty space happening to coincidentally hit a dot of a world a hundred million kilometers away, or even hundreds of light years away, no problem.

And they think a pandemic will help them? Aside from the tastelessness of that notion, we can’t even convince millions of people to wear a mask, yet they think this will convince them that we’re all descendants of Martians? At best it means these guys think people are gullible enough to fall for their crackpot ideas now.